Events or indices

Abstract

The paper discusses the question of whether events should be used as part of formal semantic systems aiming at describing temporal structure in natural language or not, the alternative being to use numbers. In particular, it will be argued that an approach which aims at tying up semantic information with number systems is much simpler than a system based on the Russell-Wiener-construction in which time is derived from events. In fact, the notion of event is essentially a macro-notion useful at the level of discourse analysis, not at the micro-level in which predication is to be decomposed into its constituent parts